Google open-sources Jaiku

Following up on its plans to ditch the Jaiku micro-blogging engine due to the currently unfavourable economic climate, search giant Google has announced the availability of all project code under an open-source licence.

After announcing at the start of the year that it was to trim back non-core service offerings in order to weather the current credit crunch, Google was keen to placate fans of its Twitter-alike Jaiku micro-blogging service by offering to release the entire source code to the public – allowing the creation of spin-off services which would maintain complete compatibility with the original, and the continued development of the engine itself. As reported over on DownloadSquad yesterday, the company has made good on its promise.

The entire code base has been made available on the Google Code software repository, and is licensed under the terms of the Apache Licence 2.0 – making it entirely possible for open-source coders to implement the engine in their own projects. As part of the move, code which relied on being executed on Google's own private servers has been removed: the system now runs on Google's App Engine service.

The allied project Jaiku Mobile – developed by Mika Raento – is also available for modification, under the MIT or GPLv2 licence scheme. The current version of the client is no longer able to connect to Jaiku, as it's still looking for the old version hosted directly by Google – but a new build has been promised.

While the Jaiku project will no longer receive any direct contributions from Google the Jaiku.com site will remain active for the time being, thanks to “a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers” who are now responsible for running the show.

Should the Jaiku fans give up and move to Twitter, or is the open source nature of the platform enough to tempt you into giving it a tweak? Perhaps you think the very idea of micro-blogging is worthless? Share your thoughts over in the forums.